Speaking of SS's on planes, I remember when the guy sitting in front of me finished his meal in record time and then abruptly reclined his seat all the way - thus spilling my food and drink everywhere. Why the airline doesn't design the seats so that that can't happen, I have no idea.

Then there was the girl who took the window seat and proceeded to need the bathroom no fewer than five times during a 2-hour flight. I have nothing but sympathy for folks who have, ahem, digestive issues - I have them myself - but she had requested that window seat. The kicker was when we were served our meals, and my husband and I were just about to eat when she said plaintively "I have to go to the baaaaathroooom." That required us to somehow wiggle our way out of our seats around our trays, pick up our meals, and elevate the trays - all while trying not to get in the way of the flight attendants. One of whom, by the way, then berated me, saying condescendingly "I know you're trying to help, but please, just let me clean up your trays for you." Gah. I guess he thought that I'd finished my meal (I hadn't even touched it) and was trying to give him my dishes.

Ooooh! All the talk of flying, I completely forgot about this- DF(all 6'8") of him and I were flying from Italy to NYC. It was a rather empty overnight flight and we had four seats between the two of us. Given his leg length, despite the extra seats DF sat on the aisle, extending his legs into in whenever feasible. When we first got on the plane, we had asked the man in the row ahead of us (4 seats, one man) if he wouldn't mind switching, as his had two aisle seats with nothing in front of him. He declined, and we sat as assigned.

45 minutes or so into our 6 hour flight, the man in front of us decided to sleep. He systematically went down his row putting the seat backs down, until he got to the seat right in front of DF, which he tried to put back, but was not able to due to the fact that even with his legs into the aisle, DF's legs literally took up all of the space behind the seat.

Physics were at play now, with the man in front of us pushing back with all his might, jostling the seat and bouncing in it, while DF sat there, his knees getting bumped and bruised, but still not magically disappearing. Finally the man stood up and proceeded to berate DF in Italian (DF speaks none of it, I was laughing too hard at the man calling him things like a goat legged mule head to be very helpful with translations) Finally the flight attendants came over and nicely explained to the man that it was physically impossible for DF to move his legs, and as the man had a row to himself, perhaps he could sit in another seat. The man was having none of this, and it was only when threatened with intervention from several service members on board, did his begrudgingly sit down.

The kicker was that when he lay across the seats, the tips of his toes touched the edge of the seat in front of DF that he so badly wanted to recline...

Logged

"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which." Douglas Adams

"That's why we Lutherans use grape kool-aid for the blood of Christ!" - one of my favorite lines from Drop Dead Gorgeous, a fantastically funny movie you should all see

One of the most hysterically funny movies I've ever seen! Love it!

Must agree. A tour de force for all involved.

That movie actually ruined West Wing for me, since the same actress who plays the trailer-trash-type friend also plays CJ on West Wing. Every time I see an episode of West Wing where she's all polished and put together now, I picture her cackling in the auditorium at the beauty pageant. She's a seriously talented actress, because she pulls off both roles so well, but there's really no similarity between the two

Agreed. Allison Janney was the bomb in that movie and although I never watched West Wing I was fascinated by clips of her in the show acting so different.

She has a very small but memorable role in 10 Things I Hate About You that is also hilarious.

Tyler, I do have a theory for your patient truck driver. It's possible that either himself or his passenger had a temporary disability (using crutches or a walker, or just needed a little extra space) and didn't have a handicap parking permit. The spot you were in was reasonably close, and next to the access aisle, so when he came back out, he could be sure he had the extra space to get in and out of his truck. I've stalked similar spots when for whatever reason I didn't have one of the boys' permits with me but did have a boy who needed a wheelchair. My choices are to park way out in the back and take several spots, or wait patiently for somebody to vacate a space adjacent to a handicap spot.

That might not be the case with your spot-stalker, but it is a reasonable explanation.

I stalked almost but not quite handicapped spots when I was driving my disabled mom before she got her permit too. I was always patient though and didn't acted annoyed when someone was being slower than I liked. Or if there was a loading area, I'd drop her at the door and pick her back up.

My friend cleans her church once a week and usually she does it during the week but due to other things she ended up doing it on Saturday after a baptism was held. Apparently the children in this family were horribly behaved so she had quite a mess to clean up. Crumbled wax in the carpet (it's a Greek Orthodox church, they have candles for the parishioners to light and pray prior to liturgy) from kids using unlit candles as swords, crayon ground into the carpet and someone's gum stuck to the carpet.

She said the priest was utterly exasperated by this family because apparently they think the kids can do no wrong and there's no discipline at all.

Logged

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here. Be cheerful, strive to be happy. -Desiderata

B/G: My parents needed me and the kids out of the house today. They have an extremely important meeting and needed several hours to go through paperwork and get everything together. They asked me if I could take the kids somewhere and be gone until after dinner. At the last minute, my uncle offered to take my little brother, leaving me with my little sister and two of my boys (one of my boys is visiting my older sister in another state.) I spent a couple minutes trying to figure out where to go, then packed for a beach trip, grabbed the dogs and off we went.

I remember now why I rarely venture past the northern most of the Florida Keys. Today I decided to go all the way down to Key West. It's about a 3 hour drive one way, so I figured 6 hours of driving and a couple hours at the beach would keep us out of the house for long enough for my parents to get done what they needed. The SS drivers in the Keys are awful. Most of the 120ish miles of US1 are two lanes. There are occasional passing areas, and a few spots (mostly through the more populated areas) that are four lane. Of course the parts of the road that goes through the populated areas have lower speed limits.

Today I saw:

-Pick up truck driver tailgating me even though I was driving 10mph over the speed limit, who decided to pass me illegally, flipping me the bird as he did so.

-Driver in front of me who dawdled 20mph under the speed limit until the moment we hit a passing zone, then floored it and drove 80mph in the passing zone, and slowed back down as soon as the passing zone ended.

-Driver who attempted to beat the draw bridge. Thankfully, the driver thought better of it at the last second and managed to squeal to a stop without hurting anybody or anything.

-Driver who stopped suddenly in the middle of the road, pulled only half off the road, then proceeded to get out and start taking pictures. This happened in the traffic lane going the other direction as me.

On a more light hearted note, the Cats and Gypsy Chickens that get free run all throughout Key West are very SS, and they know that nobody is ever going to do anything about it, so if they want to block traffic for 10 minutes while they get a drink from a puddle in the middle of the road, they have no problems doing so.

Logged

Some people lift weights. I lift measures. It's a far more esoteric workout. - (Quoted from a personal friend)

I don't know if this was SS or not, but when we went on vacation several years ago you could bring your own food on the flight. I don't know exactly what the rules were there, but I brought a bag of trail mix and some potato chips. All set! Then we started to notice this...very intense odor. It smelled like old rotting mackerel, or something. We couldn't figure out what it was, or where it was coming from. Then we spotted a family a few rows ahead of us and on the other side of the aisle, passing a package back and forth and sharing from it. From what I could tell, it seemed to be fish jerky.

If people are allowed to bring their own food on board, I think that it's SS (or, at least, very inconsiderate) to bring something stinky that everyone will have to sit there and smell for four hours.

I had a Special Snowflake customer. He was right to be a bit annoyed as a previous person from our company gave him incorrect information that probably mildly inconvenienced him. Thing is, that person was the third person with managerial authority the customer had talked to, and if he had accepted what the first two had told him, which is what I reiterated when I talked to the customer, he would not have been inconvenienced. He was told that something was not covered under the warranty.

When I talked to him, I was the 4th person at my level or so that he talked to (the first two were in a different "branch"- hard to explain without me giving away who I work for, but they have at least as much if not more authority than I do), and he was not being told anything different than he had been told earlier. The incorrect information given was on the nature of an appointment being set up incorrectly. Wasted some of the customer's time, yes, but not promising him we could do something that we couldn't.

When I told him that no, I wasn't going to cover what was going on, the customer became VERY upset, asked me the same thing over and over, and went on about the "principle" of the thing. When I tried explaining anything, he'd do his best to twist my words, and not accept that some things aren't simple to answer. Whenever I tried elaborating, or giving something more complicated than a one sentence answer (to things that do NOT have one sentence answers, and I told him that) he accused me of not listening to his question. If he didn't like the answer, I wasn't answering his question. If I told him I couldn't give him what he wanted, that x was what I COULD do, he accused me of not listening.

By the way, he told me that he made over $250k a year to explain it wasn't the money (an amount less than $100), it was the principle.

I don't know if I explained that well... I'm still angry at the customer. Not for being upset, but for how he treated me when I tried to explain the situation, and give longer than one sentence answers to his questions.

DH is nominated here. About an hour ago (so 11:30 at night), I was sound asleep in our bedroom when DH walks in and proceeds to try to have a conversation with me -- yes, while I'm sleeping (and it's the 2nd time in a week or so that he's done this -- the first time, I flat out told him I was half-asleep and not paying attention to a word he was saying because, really, I was barely conscious and not wanting his unnaturally loud voice blaring me awake for a non-emergency reason in the middle of the night). This time, I gave him a grunt in response hoping he would stop talking (he did). DH then gets into bed with a total lack of grace so I feel all the vibrations on my side of the bed. Wait, it doesn't stop there. He then shifts but not like moving one limb or another but the kind of shifting where you lift yourself somewhat and thud back into place a few inches in one direction or another. He does this every few seconds. Then, as he continues to do this, he also decides he needs to read his iPhone -- his superbright iPhone in the darkness of our bedroom. All of this is taking place in our bedroom in our 1400+ SF home where he could be ANYWHERE else in the house than the one place I happen to be sleeping.

I endure all of this for about 5-10 minutes because I figure, with each action, he will settle down to sleep right afterwards. When he continued to ungracefully shift his bodyweight on the bed (so, really, eliminating my ability to go back to sleep since the bed keeps moving), I finally decide to just get up. However, I go straight to the bathroom because a) I really need to go anyway and b) I could conceal the additional reason I'm getting up.

While I'm in the bathroom obviously relieving myself, I hear DH come out of our bedroom (I'm pretty sure to find me). He finds I'm in the bathroom, I'm sure, since he goes back to our bedroom, so I'm hoping that that is the end of it. Nope. After I come out of the bathroom and head to the kitchen, he comes out of our bedroom again and confronts me, asking me why I got up. Seriously??? I thought, "I wasn't going to say a word." Besides, he had gotten up a few hours earlier in the evening, and I thought nothing of it. He pressed on with his questions so I told him, "Honestly? Being in bed was like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. You kept moving and moving and moving so I finally decided just to get up. I wasn't going to say anything at all since I had to go to the bathroom anyway, but you insisted on knowing the answer."

I mean, really??? DH has not adjusted well to the idea that he lives with someone now (me) and that everything can't be his way (thus making him SS). He can't read his super-bright iPhone in the dark in our bedroom, keep making the bed move like it's a ship at sea, sleep smack dab in the middle so there's no room for me to be on it and make voluntary noises (like "comfort grunts" and loud sniffles because he refuses to get up and blow his nose) and expect that I, the other person in the bedroom, should not only not say a word but endure it, rather than move to another room so <gasp> I could actually sleep. I tried mentioning the noise thing to him a couple of times, but he got really offended so, now, I'll just get up. I'm perfectly happy to sleep in another room (not because I necessarily don't want to sleep next to him but because I'm happy to fall asleep on any other bed in our house). He takes it as an insult and, while I don't lodge any complaints as the reason why I'm sleeping elsewhere (see part where I'm happy to sleep anywhere in the house as a rule), if confronted, I'm going to tell him it's him if he pushes for the answer and it really is because of him.

To be fair, DH did apologize, although I think it was more an apology of frustration (AKA the non-apology of obligation because you feel your spouse not pleased). It went something like, "I'm sorry. I was trying to get comfortable. I guess I should've just stayed out of bed." I didn't respond as I had already been compelled to say more than I wanted to say and, also, my thought was, "Yeah, you should've stayed out of bed since I was sleeping while you were busy doing things that you could've done anywhere else in the house."

Yup, my normally considerate and lovable DH, for tonight, wins the SS award. Me, OTOH, once I get tired enough (like now), I'm going to, once again, happily crash on the couch in another room and know the only movement I'll feel is my own. : )

Gate agents are responsible for getting the flights out on time, and it's often interesting to watch the interplay between the gate agents and the flight attendants on matters like this. The flight was plenty full; what this family did was essentially demand that others move around to accommodate them and by the time someone said they wouldn't move (triggering the challenge by the FAs for boarding slips), the gate agents were in the "hurry up, we gotta close the door and shove back from the gate" mode. The mommy was traveling with her own dad and mom, and the father had taken the aisle seat and "shamed" anyone wanting their own assigned seat by saying "you don't want to sit next to two kids, so go to another row."

The mommy compounded the fun during the flight by repeatedly trying to slam her seat back (she was right in front of me) and could not, so she'd glare at me as though I were denying her the sprawl. Hey, I was in an exit row, which mean that her seat wouldn't recline - by law. The passenger next to me told me that the family originally tried to occupy our exit row, but the flight attendants had them move - since you can't have children in an exit row, especially not lap "babies." According to my seatmate, mommy was crabby about that because she wanted one or more of her babies to be able to lay down in the additional legroom area that exit rows feature.

Oh, they were special to the max.

They had gotten on our flight early (and staked out their special seats) because "gramma" needed a wheelchair for boarding. Well, as often happens on flights to vacation destinations, mine was a "Miracle Flight." Miraculous, because the very same people who have to be carted on board via wheelchair and thusly gain early boarding (along with their entourage,) miraculously become spry and agile upon landing - as was the case with gramma, who charged out of her seat two rows behind me right before the seat belt sign went off at the gate after landing, to start flipping up the four different overhead bins where their stuff was stashed.

If I were you I would send a letter of complaint to the airline and the FAA. They should have been kicked off the plan for the emergency row stunt and every stunt after.

"If people are allowed to bring their own food on board, I think that it's SS (or, at least, very inconsiderate) to bring something stinky that everyone will have to sit there and smell for four hours."

I'd say it's rude but not SS behavior because it could have been inadvertent (they may not have realized that it smelled or that the smell would bother others) and they weren't breaking any rules.

I don't know if this was SS or not, but when we went on vacation several years ago you could bring your own food on the flight. I don't know exactly what the rules were there, but I brought a bag of trail mix and some potato chips. All set! Then we started to notice this...very intense odor. It smelled like old rotting mackerel, or something. We couldn't figure out what it was, or where it was coming from. Then we spotted a family a few rows ahead of us and on the other side of the aisle, passing a package back and forth and sharing from it. From what I could tell, it seemed to be fish jerky.

If people are allowed to bring their own food on board, I think that it's SS (or, at least, very inconsiderate) to bring something stinky that everyone will have to sit there and smell for four hours.

I agree. Compared to other airlines, Virgin is my favorite and I have had nothing but excellent experiences with them....if only they would remove the tuna fish from their inflight meal options.....

Whoever thought it would be a good idea to eat tuna fish on a plane? YUK!!!